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In the latest twist to the contentious America’s Cup, regatta director Iain Murray threatened Wednesday to scuttle the competition unless his safety recommendations are upheld by the Cup’s international jury.

The five-member jury is scheduled to meet Monday to hear a protest by Emirates Team New Zealand and Italy’s Luna Rossa Challenge over Murray’s recommendation regarding rudder elevators.

The dispute is nothing out of the ordinary for the America’s Cup. Legal wrangling has been a long-standing element of its history, which dates to 1851. As the event approaches its San Francisco debut, it has been beset by accidents, the death of a sailor, disputes over the rules and questions about the viability of racing on 72-foot catamarans in the first place.

The rudder elevators are the winglets on the base of the rudder blades that help control the pitch of the boat. The configuration of the elevators is the only remaining unresolved part of Murray’s 37 recommendations following the death of British sailor Andrew Simpson when Artemis Racing capsized on May 9.

If the jury agrees with New Zealand and Luna Rossa, Murray said he’ll go back to the Coast Guard, which issued a racing permit this week, and say he doesn’t think the racing would be safe.

In that case, the Coast Guard would almost certainly withdraw its permit. “Without a permit to race on San Francisco Bay, there will be no regatta,” Murray said.

The Coast Guard could not immediately be reached for comment.

Murray, who is employed by all the teams, acting in a partnership, insisted he isn’t going to resign. “I don’t like to leave things unfinished,” he said.

In the meantime, the Louis Vuitton Cup challenger series will begin at 12:15 p.m. Sunday with a race between the two protesting teams. Luna Rossa and New Zealand are sailing with elevators that meet the minimum specifications of Murray’s recommendations.

But Team New Zealand CEO Grant Dalton thinks the wider, heavier elevators prescribed by Murray could give defending champion Oracle Team USA a competitive advantage. Murray called that claim “farcical.”

The Kiwis say they built their boat under a set of rule that has now been changed. Luna Rossa is in the same predicament, having bought its boat design from New Zealand.

During a media tour of the Italian team base Tuesday, Luna Rossa skipper Max Sirena said the rudder elevator change was “nothing related to safety. What really upsets me is that there is one boat sailing (Oracle) since they launched onApril 24who has been sailing out of the class rule.”

“Why design a boat that doesn’t comply with the class rule? And then one week before the Louis Vuitton Cup, you (Murray) ask the other teams to change the position of the rudders and the elevators.”

All the teams have added foils to the boats, even though they weren’t part of the original design. When the 72-foot catamarans reach a certain speed, they lift out of the water and ride on the two rudder elevators and the daggerboard of whichever of the two hulls is in the water. With greatly reduced drag, the boats can sail dramatically faster, up to 50 mph.

Dalton said larger elevators are not “necessary or safe at all.” In Murray’s recommended changes, the elevators would extend beyond the beam, or width, of the boat, Dalton said. If a crew member fell over the side, he said, the elevator could cut him in half.

According to Dalton, the Murray proposal on elevators would change a class rule and therefore requires the unanimous consent of the competitors.

Murray said that when he issued his safety recommendations on May 22, there was no objection to the elevator change.

“The recommendations were universally accepted as what was good for the event going forward,” Murray said. In fact, he said, Dalton “was probably the strongest supporter at that meeting.”

He said Dalton shook his hand in front of the other team representatives and told him, “You will not get any pushback from Team New Zealand.”

But Dalton said Tuesday the Kiwis don’t have rudder elevators to fit the new rules. “Even if we had them, we wouldn’t dare go out with an untested system and suddenly go racing. Why would you do that? It doesn’t make sense.”

As Murray sees it, the Oracle capsize in October and the Artemis accident made it clear that heavier rudder elevators were needed to minimize the possibility of a pitch-pole. That’s what happens when the bows of the catamarans submerge and the stern lifts out of the water.

Murray said he acted because he didn’t think the teams had responded vigorously to make the racing safer in the wake of Simpson’s death. “Clearly some of the teams didn’t take that accident seriously enough,” he said.

An investigation into the accident is being conducted by the San Francisco Police Department, which has yet to issue a report. Murray said he went ahead with his safety recommendations because he felt he knew as much as he needed to about the incident.

“The boat broke in the process of capsizing,” he said.

The larger elevators would aid in controlling the 7 1/2-ton boats, a point that Murray said was underscored recently when Luna Rossa twice lost control and went into the buffer zone that surrounds the course.

New Zealand’s contention that the changes are being made too close to the start of racing is off base, Murray said. “All the teams agreed with the principles on May 22,” he said.

Now, however, he said, New Zealand and Luna Rossa “want to cherry-pick the parts that don’t suit them out of it.”

Even if his recommendations are upheld, Murray said, he couldn’t guarantee that the regatta will be completely safe. “Is any sport safe?” he said. “Certainly we’ve made things safer.” But he said the sailors “are aggressive on the race course. There are a lot of things that happen in a race that I don’t think are safe.”

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Tom FitzGerald is the Stanford sports beat writer for The Chronicle. In more than three decades at The Chronicle, he has covered the 49ers and Raiders and a wide variety of other sports, including auto races. Among the many momentous games he has covered were the 49ers' victory over Dallas in the 1982 NFC Championship Game, which featured "The Catch'' by Dwight Clark, and the U.S. hockey team’s 1980 Olympic upset of the Soviet Union in Lake Placid, N.Y. At the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, he rode the bobsled run with members of the U.S. team for a first-person story. In 2012 he rode on Russell Coutts’ Oracle Team USA catamaran for another first-person story during the America's Cup World Series. In 2014 he rode with IndyCar legend Mario Andretti in a racecar at Sonoma Raceway, hitting speeds of more than 150 mph.
For 15 years he wrote a popular sports humor column called “Top of the Sixth’’ (later named Open Season). He lives in Martinez.